U.S. to roll back auto pollution rules meant to fight climate change
The Trump administration is expected Tuesday to announce its final rule to roll back Obama-era automobile fuel-efficiency standards, relaxing efforts to limit climate-warming tailpipe pollution and virtually undoing the government’s biggest effort to combat climate change.
The new rule would allow vehicles on U.S. roads to emit nearly 1 billion tons more carbon dioxide over the lifetime of the cars than they would have under the Obama standards and hundreds of millions of tons more than will be emitted under standards being implemented in Europe and Asia.
Trump administration officials raced to complete the auto rule by this spring, even as the White House was consumed with responding to the coronavirus crisis. President Donald Trump is expected to extol the rule, which will stand as one of the most consequential regulatory rollbacks of his administration, as a needed salve for an economy crippled by the pandemic.
The lower fuel-efficiency standard “is the single most important thing that the administration can do to fulfill President Trump’s campaign promise of reforming the regulatory state, and to undo the impact that the previous administration has had on the economy,” said Thomas Pyle, president of the Institute for Energy Research, which supports the use of fossil fuels.
Trump’s critics said the rule showed his disregard for science and could harm the economy over time. The administration’s own draft economic analyses of the rule showed that it could hurt consumers by forcing them to buy more gasoline. And a February report by government-appointed scientists, many of them selected by the Trump administration, concluded that “there are significant weaknesses in the scientific analysis” of the rule.
“This is not just an inopportune moment to finalize a major rule-making,” said Sen. Thomas R. Carper of Delaware, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Environment Committee. “In this case, it’s a completely irresponsible one.”
Even many large automakers, which had asked Trump to slightly loosen the Obamaera rule, had urged him not to roll it back so aggressively because the measure is certain to get bogged down in court for years, leaving their industry in regulatory limbo.
“The auto industry has consistently called for yearover-year increases in fuel efficiency,” said John Bozzella, president of the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, a lobbying group that represents the world’s largest auto companies. “We need a policy environment that drives improvements in fuel economy.”
The new rule, which is expected to be implemented by late spring, will roll back a 2012 rule that required automakers’ fleets to average about 54 mpg by 2025. Instead, the fleets would have to average about 40 mpg.